Vincenzo Brenna: The Travelling Architect

Dimitri Ozerkov

Architect Vincenzo Brenna (1741–1820) was born in Rome and spent the first 40 years of his life there. During this period, he undertook extensive voyages in Italy as a draughtsman in search of Roman antiquities. He then moved to Poland and Russia where he became a famous architect working for the tsar. Upon his death in Dresden, he possessed an important archive of drawings and prints that then disappeared. This 2023 research project reconstructed Brenna’s activity as an artist, while also revisiting his thoughts about architecture and reevaluating his role in the Translatio Romae in the era of The Grand Tour. 
Since Brenna’s work does not belong to any national art history, he was a virtually unknown figure for many years. Some saw in his architecture the beginnings of Romanticism while others considered them to be merely an expression of the taste of his patrons, the most important of whom was Paul I of Russia.
The main focus of this year of study in Rome was directed at detailed research of Brenna’s activity during his 40 years in Italy. The results permitted me to reconstruct his conception of art as it emerged in the period when he was trained as an architect. The analysis of his letters and drawings, now dispersed through various European collections, as well as of his designs for the title pages of books, made it possible to understand the ties that related him to Piranesi and Pacetti, with both of whom he collaborated. His answer to a criticism of G. L. Bianconi published in 1775 can be considered as a short statement of his understanding of Roman antiquity. Through his studies of the Domus Aurea and his work on the decoration of Roman festive and funereal events, Brenna was able to formulate his understanding of the “entirety” (il tutto) of the Roman antiquity and to find the way to transfer this idea later to other national contexts. When in Russia, he formulated the architectural image of St Petersburg in a way that drew inspiration from Rome.
Research in the Vatican library in 2023 facilitated a better understanding of Brenna’s relation to the pope, from whom he received his Order of the Golden Spur. Another point of research was related to Brenna’s activity in the Accademia di San Luca, which possesses the famous portrait of Brenna by Vighy. An analysis of the Roman architectural milieu of the 1760s and 1770s served as the basis for reconstructing Brenna’s connections to his teachers in architecture as well as to his contemporaries in this professional field including Camillo Buti, Alessandro Specchi, Filippo Barigioni, and Luigi Vanvitelli. In this context, special attention was paid to Nicola Michetti and Paolo Posi, the architects related to Palazzo Colonna, the place of the famous Chinea decorations, and the birthplace of Brenna himself. The next chapter examines Brenna’s last 20 years after he left Russia. Travelling between Dresden and Rome, he traded artworks, participated in the meetings of the Accademia di San Luca, sold his prints, and took part in the annual exhibitions in the capital of Saxony. The analysis of the exhibition catalogues of the 1810s and the critical reviews (often negative) deepen our understanding of the interest Brenna still attracted in his later years and invite us to consider the aesthetic value of his taste in the early 1800s.